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Tackling the Practical Challenges of the Postdigital Era

CIOs will need to marshal the full scope of the IT shop’s capabilities to lead the enterprise into the postdigital era.

The confluence of five postdigital forces—analytics, mobile, social business, cloud, and cyber security—is causing a seismic shift in the business landscape. Previously unimagined innovations are now possible, while rapidly emerging technologies threaten to disrupt well-established businesses.

For CIOs, the postdigital era offers an unprecedented opportunity to shape business performance and enhance the enterprise’s competitive position. But CIOs shouldn’t let excitement over the possibilities distract them from the practical challenges. All aspects of the IT shop will require attention to help make the enterprise’s postdigital ambitions a reality.

In conjunction with serving as a catalyst for postdigital adoption throughout the enterprise, CIOs should seek to raise the IT shop’s performance in the following areas:

Finance and portfolio management. Many organizations have a rigid investment process, with business cases evaluated at predefined times during the calendar year. This often works fine for large ticket, multiyear initiatives like data center modernization or an ERP rollout. But for CIOs to become true postdigital catalysts, their planning and prioritization efforts need to become more agile and responsive. The key is to build capabilities in finance and portfolio management. Strong capabilities in these areas will allow IT organizations to enhance their understanding of how well resources and releases are performing. They can use this knowledge to enable and inform a more flexible process for investment decisions.

Flexible delivery model. Although a waterfall delivery model is well suited for long-running projects having a broad scope, that’s not the case for smaller, dynamic efforts. To pursue a more flexible delivery model, organizations have formed a rapidly deployable team with diverse skills that may not traditionally have been applied in IT. Team members include graphic designers, user experience engineers, or even anthropologists and cognitive psychologists—in addition to business leads, technology engineers, QA resources, and project managers. To satisfy business owners’ expectations to see results, IT leaders develop working prototypes and emphasize hands-on experimentation.

Information disciplines. Data management, stewardship, correlation, cleansing, analytics, and visualization can be critical disciplines in the postdigital era. Infusing information into the enterprise’s activities should be at the top of the CIO’s agenda. This broad-based effort includes applying data to decision-making, using actionable metrics in reports, building service-based capabilities, and articulating IT’s mission and related services in terms that the business can understand.

Integration. Integration and orchestration will likely become the building blocks of tomorrow’s IT organization. A dynamic middle tier is important for managing end-to-end interactions between legacy on-premises packages, rapidly developed emerging technologies, and cloud solutions. Flexibility in terms of service quality, transaction management, the degree of routing determinism, business rules, and policy management will likely be critical.

Vendor management. Technology footprints are trending toward more heterogeneity. Organizations should give priority to managing contracts, licenses, subscriptions, service levels, updates, patches, and release schedules. More strategically, organizations can help fuel innovation and hedge against disruptions by pursuing joint ventures or value-based arrangements with a mix of established players and start-ups.

Architecture. Architecture and design are the core currency of the Postdigital Enterprise™. While solution architects conversant with business processes and objectives will likely become the most sought after talent, enterprise architecture up and down the stack should be treated as a serious discipline with dedicated assets.

Enabling skills, methods, and tools. Each postdigital force requires a set of skills, methods, and tools that may or may not be mature in the organization—or even in the market. This means CIOs will need to address a wide range of questions as vendor markets evolve with breathtaking speed: What are the right mobile app development tools for your needs? As “bring your own device” evolves into “bring your own app,” what are the right approaches for mobile device management and mobile app management? Does the organization have the data science experience required for generating actionable insights from the rising flood of unstructured data? Do you understand the people, process, and technology implications of an increasingly social business environment? What is the right blend of IT and business services catalogs in the hybrid cloud environment? What are the right methods for digital asset management and secure innovation given the confluence of analytics, social business, and mobile in the borderless cloud? Answering these questions calls for an experimental IT approach, using prototypes and multiple initiatives to find the most appropriate choices in an iterative manner.

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CIOs control significant assets and resources, and will need to marshall all of them to lead the enterprise into the postdigital era. IT departments that aren’t seen as reliable, efficient, and effective are at risk of being relegated to utility status.

About Deloitte Insights

Deloitte Insights for CIOs couples broad business insights with deep technical knowledge to help executives drive business and technology strategy, support business transformation, and enhance growth and productivity. Through fact-based research, technology perspectives and analyses, case studies and more, Deloitte Insights for CIOs informs the essential conversations in global, technology-led organizations. Learn more.

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